1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications and, more particularly, to methods and systems for managing and sharing user personal information using presence.
2. Description of Related Art
A personal information manager, or “PIM”, is a type of software application that is designed to provide users with personal, event, and group calendaring, along with task and contact management. A PIM application can be client-based (such as Microsoft Outlook, for instance) and/or server-based (such as Microsoft Exchange Server or WebEvent, for instance). Through a suitable client application, a user can interact with the PIM application to enter, modify and view information, such as calendar events and names, addresses and phone number of contacts.
At the same time, the telecommunications industry has recently embraced a concept known as “presence”, according to which one network entity, such as a telecommunications user, can report a change in its status to another network entity. User status may encompass variety of information such as user physical location (e.g., at home, at the office, etc.), communications state (e.g., currently on the phone, able to accept a call, etc.), willingness to communicate (e.g., available, in a meeting, do not disturb, etc.) and a preferred communication mechanism (e.g., voice, email, video, etc.).
As defined by industry recommendations, presence is based on a system of subscriptions and notifications exchanged between two distinct sets of entities known as “watchers” and “presentities”. By definition, watchers are entities that request presence information and presentities are entities that provide presence information. More particularly, a watcher can “subscribe” to a presentity to be notified when a change occurs with respect to the status of the presentity. And the presentity may then “notify” the watcher when a status change occurs.
Presence-based technology has been already successfully applied in instant messaging (IM) services to provide online/offline user status information. To illustrate, when a user logs into an IM system, an IM client (e.g., user agent client) on the user's terminal may alert some central server such as an IM/presence server that the user has signed on, by sending a registration message to the IM/presence server. In effect, in this arrangement, the user's IM client is functioning as a presentity, since the IM client is alerting the IM/presence server of a change of status at the user's client station.
Further, an IM client may subscribe to the IM/presence server, to be notified when other users sign onto the system (and are therefore available to receive instant messages). To do so, the IM client (as watcher) may send a subscription message to the IM/presence server, requesting to be notified when specified other users register with the server (for example, a user may maintain a buddy list which is a list of people a user wants to keep track of). In turn, when one of those specified other users (as presentity) registers with the server, the server may send a notification message to the subscribing IM client, indicating that the other user has signed onto the system.
While providing user online status is useful, a need for broader personal interaction among communications users still exists.